March Madness

I am an on/off fan of basketball and have reverence for the game. It's a great sport for school kids too, a real teamwork kind of interaction.

BUT

There is a dark side to it, for example... March, springtime in the Rockies, to be specific.

There is a collegiate basketball tournament this weekend in a big Montana city so players are coming from many places in and outside the state. Currently we are 18 hours into a serious blizzard, already have 3+ feet since late yesterday afternoon with blowing and drifting, visibility - half a block and only because there's a streetlight there.

I get up at stupid early hours, way ahead of my neighbors. I was sitting here browsing DU when I started to hear shouting outside. Concerned someone might be in need of help I started peeking out from behind my heavy drapes.

What I found was my neighbor and her son trying to clear her Honda van (no clearance whatsoever) so she could get out the driveway... at 5am. This not being an hour they are likely to be up, I opened my door to see if there was some emergency, my vehicles would be able to clear the three ft of snow if there was. But no, they were trying to get to the basketball tournament in big city over a hundred miles away. They have a few of the players to transport so they have to get there.

Noticing I was becoming coated with snow from head to toe just peeking out the door, I asked if they needed more light and turned on my laser blaster porch light for them.

So I dried off, scooped up the bucket of snow that fell inside from the knee high drift up against the door and pulled up the road report on the computer. I mean, this blizzard is not going to let up even a tiny bit until late Monday at least. All the mountain passes in the western end of the state are closed, they probably have about five ft of new snow, at least. I'm surprised they haven't closed more of the interstate.

So I get my long down coat on and pull on boots and step outside to implore them to give it up and go make some phone calls, consider their safety. I told them the roads would probably be closed by the time they got to the Interstate, after all their work. That young man shoveled a good 40ft of 3ft deep snow in the end. I encouraged them to use cat litter, which they did, another neighbor came out and gave them more.

Fortunately I was assured that they had decided I was making sense but had to go down the hill, about a mile, to get the brother. Our street doesn't usually get plowed, you have to make it to the main road that goes up to the rich people's house to find plowed road. I wonder if they will get down the hill with all the drifting and I have my doubts about how they'll make it back up.

So why didn't the tournament get postponed until this monster snowstorm passed? Just getting there is risking the lives of the players and all of their individual entourage groups.

Meanwhile, I will stay inside and rearrange my furniture like I planned. On the radio we are being told as much as 3 INCHES is expected... we have 36 of them already!

*sigh*

https://www.aviationweather.gov/satellite/plot?region=cod



The rotation is counter clockwise so the stuff on the right is rotating to the left.

It's not that I hadn't expected it to be...

Especially when the pandemic got rolling. I knew it would take those two and others, they were vulnerable by age alone.

There was something I did conclude on my own early into the pandemic, tough, that I will briefly describe here as we are now in the end of the first stage of the process.

Cultural anthropology is where I am coming from here though genetic anthropology is the place the original theory was determined;

Remember Stephen Jay Gould? Remember his theory of Punctuated Equilibrium? (I realize that Dr. Gould was a genetic anthropologist and his theory is meant to describe an attribute of genetic evolution, I have managed to extrapolate the basic theory to a more mundane level of culture, and philosophical ecosystems.)

Briefly, the theory claims that evolution did not occur in a metered set of steps, rather, they took place during , perhaps, catastrophic events in leaps and bounds which is where some genetic selection took place due to necessity of survival. (How's that for brief? )

So I have concluded that this pandemic will prove itself to be one of those punctuated equilibrium events where all of our species is affected by the same thing which will cause all of our species to come to a reckoning on the philosophical, spiritual and cultural levels all within a rather short time frame, thus the word punctuated.

Now, two years in, I am seeing some areas of significant change, Hard to articulate at this point put things are definitely shifting on many levels, hang in there 'cause we're only two years in on a three to five year process. Changes will include a reduction in global population though we won't know how significant that will be until three or four years from now. People on the planet now are all in some kind of internal review, some will learn from it, others not.

I just hope the changes bring us to a better place as a species, if not, the planet will evict us.

What ever happened to...

this --> ?

Where has the question mark gone? Why does it rarely appear at the end of questions that I see here in thread titles and in comments?

Honestly. It detracts from the purpose of the words present to have to reread questions several times because writers either use a period at the end of a sentence that is a question or they leave nothing at all


I realize it might be asking too much but I would welcome the return of "?" at the end of sentences or phrases that are actually questions, asking for a response.

Asking for a friend.

This still makes me laugh...

Remember when the world was normal?

That Does It. I'm gonna say this and

I hope it becomes the chant every time a reprobate R shows up in public:

BABY KILLERS!! REPUBLICANS ARE BABY KILLERS!!

That should be yelled at them whenever they dare show their faces in public, everywhere, every fucking day until they leave office!


https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212218941

Need to watch this too...

This is from November last year but now that things have been moving right along we need to keep this in mind too.

Lest we forget how our thugresident operates...

Watch this, not that old and shows what we are dealing with here.

The Real Donald

and what he's really all about right here in this documentary.

****February Photo Contest Finals****

*****February Photo Contest Preliminaries Thread #2*****

Come vote for your favorite photos! There are two threads to vote in so make sure you check out both and please help keep these polls kicked.

Poll Thread #1: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027635734

The theme this month was Back to the Future: Stuff that used to be considered the cutting edge of technology - things, places, etc which at one time were the awesome newest tech on earth and now are abandoned to the past.

This is the preliminary vote on all entries then there will be a final vote based on the results of these two polls.